Outlook Grim For Big Cities

Report Cites Race Bias

April 23, 1985|By Bill Neikirk, Chicago Tribune.

WASHINGTON — Technology and economic change have rendered the large American industrial city an ``institutional anachronism,`` with an underclass of blacks and Hispanics perpetuated by white society, scholars said in a Brookings Institution report released Monday.

The decline in the industrial city probably can`t be halted in the near future, the scholars said. Indeed, some of them rejected the need for an

``urban policy`` in America at all, except for one that would disperse the huge concentration of minorities in central cities.

They said industrial cities must accept a less-exalted place in American political and social life.

They did not mince words in their analyses, which came out of a recent conference held by the research organization.

``White-dominated U.S. society has clearly chosen to create and maintain two racially separate and unequal societies, as the Kerner Commission feared it might,`` said Anthony Downs, senior Brookings fellow. The Kerner Report, issued by a special commission headed by the late Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, blamed bigotry and discrimination for setting the stage for a summer of rioting by blacks in cities across the nation in 1967.

``In spite of all pious statements to the contrary, the leaders and citizens of nearly all parts of U.S. society have no intention whatever of changing that deliberate (two-society) policy,`` Downs said.

Gary Orfield, professor of political science and public policy at the University of Chicago, said residential segregation in Chicago and other cities is a ``key contemporary institution for creating and maintaining inequality.`` He called for Chicago`s establishment to push integration in schools and neighborhoods as a matter of economic self-interest.

The educational system in Chicago ``is built on the system of residential stratification by race and tends to perpetuate both segregation and inequality,`` Orfield said. It has resulted in what he called ``ghetto-ization`` of the city.

William Julius Wilson, chairman of the university`s sociology department, said in a chapter entitled ``The Urban Underclass`` that the social problems of urban U.S. life are chiefly associated with race.

``The rates of crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, female-headed families and welfare dependency have risen dramatically in the last several years, and they reflect a noticeably uneven distribution by race,`` he said.

After citing how the plight of blacks has worsened, Wilson said discrimination is not the sole and primary cause. He blamed instead the shift from manufacturing to service industries, which has been exacerbated by a huge new flow of Hispanics into the cities. This has caused unemployment to rise and jobs to shift elsewhere.

Gentrification, in which some parts of cities are rebuilt by returning residents, is a movement bringing nothing more than ``islands of renewal in seas of decay,`` said Brian J.L. Berry, dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Paul E. Peterson, director of government studies for Brookings, recommended that the U.S. institute uniform welfare benefits nationwide to give minorities stuck in the central cities an opportunity to move out.

They could go where the jobs are, Peterson said. ``The poor and the dependent would have greater choice and would need not constantly reconnect themselves to bureaucracies with every move,`` he said.

Peterson rejected massive federal assistance to help cities, including revenue sharing and urban development action grants. He said the Reagan administration idea of urban enterprise zones, where taxes would be slashed to enable business to flourish, would help some cities and neighborhoods at the expense of others.

His basic argument was that cities should help themselves.

But Downs said that cuts in federal transfer programs have hurt the poor in central cities at precisely the time they need help the most.

Downs, in a wrapup chapter, said the report concludes that ``severe urban decline, which occurs mainly in cities in the Northeast and North Central regions, is probably irreversible in the near future.``

To test their conclusion, the scholars did a simulated analysis of a comprehensive assistance program for Cleveland and found that it would have slowed but not halted the job loss and population decline that the city otherwise would have experienced.

Downs issued a strong condemnation of white society, claiming that it follows a strategy of not letting minority groups live too near to or go to the same schools and of resisting funds for social programs. This strategy

``means society should not try to help those now isolated in low-quality communities to improve the inferior opportunities they now receive,`` he said. Downs said the Reagan administration has not proved its assertion that some of these social and economic programs are not effective.

He said minority groups should try to gain power, as they did in Chicago, by forming alliances with whites in the cities.